On this week's episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, the boys are joined by their good friend and former co-worker, Naval, to discuss a variety of topics. They talk about how to deal with racism in the workplace, what it's like to be in a "struggle room," and how to handle a situation where someone you don't like is kicked out of the room because they don't "get it." They also talk about why the idea of a struggle room "isn't so bad" and why it should be more like a social club, and how it can be a great place to hang out with other people who don't have their own social media accounts or their own podcasting accounts. And of course, there's a lot more! Thanks to our sponsor, for sponsoring this episode! Also, thank you for supporting the show and the podcast! and thanks to everyone who sent in questions and suggestions! Thank you so much for all your support, we really appreciate it. Joe Rogans Experience! - is a podcast you can't get any better than this. -Joe Rogan Podcast - by night, by day, by night. All day, all day! - by night! - by day. by day! (and by night!!) , by night . by the night! by Night! , all day!! (Joe Rogans Podcast by day!!) - By Night! by night? and by night?! with all day? by all day Cheers, Cheers! - Cheers Cheers Joe & Cheers. , Cheers - - Cheer ! x ? | :) - Cheerio @ Thank You, Joe RogAN -- Tim Dillon ~ And AND CHEERICA CHECK IT OUT! & CHEERS! -- CHECK THE PODCASTING WITH ME! | CHECK OUT THE JOE ROGAN EPISODES AND THE JOKER'S JOE'S MOST IMPORTANT MATERIALS AND THE FUTURE OF THE JOB ROSTER AND THE MOST EXCELLENCE THAT WILL SUPPORT ME AND THE KEEPING THEM THROUGH THIS EPISODE
00:01:36.000The fact that someone can come in and kick everyone off that disagrees with them, take over the room, and that they did it just because they decided...
00:01:45.000What was the reason why they gave her the option to kick everybody out and gave her administrative power or whatever it is?
00:01:52.000I think she'd been historically oppressed or something.
00:03:36.000It's difficult, it's expensive, nobody really is up for it because...
00:03:40.000It's probably not as high quality as a point-to-point conversation, but the serendipity of saying, oh, okay, I saw two people I never thought would be in the same room, and then 12 other people.
00:03:50.000At first, I think that's exciting, but then the danger of it is that they're going to burn through the novelty effects.
00:03:55.000You're going to have seen all these people collide.
00:04:04.000You know how the pieces move, but there's an insane number of possibilities that could take place.
00:04:09.000True, but I do think that there's a weird way in which you're always in danger of setting up too many different ways into the same basic source that's the value.
00:04:19.000And so you can say, okay, I've got a website, I've got a substack, I've got a podcast, I've got a book.
00:07:00.000That if you give the vines perfect soil and climate and all this stuff, they'll produce much fruitier stuff and it won't be perfectly optimized for fermenting into wine.
00:08:39.000He was a real legitimate wine collector.
00:08:42.000And then somewhere along the line, he realized that buying and selling wine was good because he was kind of quartering the market on a lot of wines.
00:09:35.000Well, there's this one particular kind of sauterne, which comes from the Semillon grape in the Bordeaux region, and it's made from this noble rot, so you get the grapes to sort of have this disease that concentrates the sugar, and I believe that Chateau de Chame, It's like weirdly drinkable beyond...
00:13:17.000Buffalo Trace, they started making whiskey in 1773. It's literally three years older than America itself.
00:13:25.000So the thing that I did not understand, I think, about wine is that if you're trying to taste your wine, you can't possibly get at what's this high-end stuff because it's only your nose that can determine these differences.
00:13:40.000That nobody's got enough stuff going on in their tongue to tell great wine.
00:13:44.000So you've got this thing called the retronasal passage in the back of your mouth.
00:15:12.000I mean, it was definitely weird because it's unusual that someone would be...
00:15:15.000I don't think it's unusual that guys are in a feat.
00:15:18.000I think it's a lot more usual than you think.
00:15:20.000But I think what is unusual is that he was so open about expressing the fact that he was in defeat in front of a group of strangers in a one-minute set on Kill Tony.
00:15:59.000And then that person doesn't know if they're going to perform or not.
00:16:02.000There's maybe 30 people that throw their names in and maybe five get to perform.
00:16:06.000And Tony pulls that name out, calls the guy or girl or non-binary folk, and they come running onto the stage and they do one minute of stand-up.
00:17:20.000Yeah, and so it's like you could develop a legitimate professional career from this, but it's like a really good path for these amateurs to get like one minute of stage time.
00:17:31.000So they hone this one minute, hoping they're going to get called onto the stage.
00:17:34.000And usually like, if you're a halfway decent comic and you've been doing it, you know, six months, a year, you probably have a minute.
00:17:41.000You probably have a minute where you could get up there and rock it for a minute.
00:17:44.000Some of them are terrible, but some of them are really funny.
00:17:47.000What's the best way to get people opened up almost instantly with no foreplay?
00:19:19.000I'm trying to figure out what happened to the guitar and what happened to COVID changing the world of guitar because everybody was indoors.
00:19:59.000And then, you know, this weird thing I was telling Jamie about...
00:20:01.000This had to have been developed long in advance before COVID. Yes, but I think a $250 item that just blows your mind may be relatively new.
00:20:12.000And I think there's one coming from...
00:20:15.000Oh, with neural DSP. So there's like competing.
00:20:19.000And Jamie was talking about the Helix.
00:20:21.000So there's like this collection of these things.
00:20:24.000And I hadn't spent $300 on my rig for 30 years or something.
00:20:38.000And then I put a brief clip of myself playing on Instagram, and I got contacted by, like, some of the greatest guitarists in the effing world.
00:20:47.000When Tosin Abasi and Joe Robinson and Ryan Roxy, who's the guitarist for, like, Alice Cooper, contact you, and they're like, This is you jamming.
00:23:16.000So I can't do that stuff, but the point that I'm starting to come to is I realize when different communities behave differently, there are angry, jealous communities and there are open-hearted, we're glad to have you on board communities.
00:23:31.000And I could not believe the quality of the people who reached out to me to give me encouragement for whatever stupid...
00:24:25.000Well, but in part, when people are, like, fans of...
00:24:29.000I mean, you do comedy, you do acting, you do jujitsu, you do so many different things that you know that there's some things that you don't do at the same level as other things.
00:24:41.000When people see that you're taking an interest, like if I found out that you were a road racing bicyclist or something like that, people would be like, wow, Joe's one of us.
00:25:13.000It was competitive with the guitar in the late 1800s, I think, and then the guitar sort of just blew it out of the water.
00:25:22.000But there's a new thing called octave mandolin, which is down an entire octave, so it doesn't have that kind of really bright, tinny sound.
00:25:29.000So I'm going to pursue the octave mandolin and see whether...
00:25:33.000Is there any benefit in a kid learning how to play the recorder?
00:25:37.000It seems like they're just fucking with those kids when they give them a recorder.
00:25:40.000Well, look, there's some cool stuff from, like, Telamon, if you're really into...
00:25:44.000Right, but, like, no one plays professional recorder, right?
00:26:39.000Yeah, well, I think I do a lot of things from scratch.
00:26:43.000I think that's how I got good at jiu-jitsu is listening.
00:26:47.000I didn't get good at jiu-jitsu because I figured it out myself.
00:26:49.000I get good because my friend Eddie Bravo is a great coach, and my original instructor Jean-Jacques Machado is a great coach, and I just listen to them.
00:26:56.000What made Eddie a great jiu-jitsu intellectual?
00:27:16.000And I tried to get him to do comedy way back in the day.
00:27:19.000And he did a few open mics, but it was just too harrowing for him.
00:27:21.000But then when he started doing a lot of seminars and got really comfortable teaching, because he became a jiu-jitsu instructor and started teaching for a living, then he got much more comfortable in front of large groups of people, and then he started doing stand-up again within the last five or six years or so,
00:27:57.000And sometimes it's a problem where he starts entertaining some ideas that are completely preposterous, and he goes deep with them because he's figured out a way with jiu-jitsu to take ideas that a lot of people didn't think were good and figured out a way to tap people out with those ideas.
00:28:12.000He took some ideas and he said, no, you just gotta...
00:28:15.000For instance, here's a perfect example.
00:28:18.000There's certain kicks that if you just showed someone it, they would say, well, that's not practical.
00:28:27.000The problem is you just haven't reached a proficiency like maybe a Stephen Wonderboy Thompson or something like that where it will become practical.
00:28:35.000A specific kick is like a spinning wheel kick.
00:29:04.000But it will work in a fight if you reach the highest level of proficiency.
00:29:08.000And Eddie had that same mindset with jiu-jitsu techniques, and he figured out a way to make some techniques that a lot of people thought were impractical, not just possible, but really very...
00:33:38.000The way that they make this move is that they synonymize the lab leak hypothesis with a synthetic virus engineered from scratch.
00:33:48.000So in other words, the idea of maybe somebody growing horseshoe bat coronavirus in human lung tissue to accelerate natural selection, because we don't know how to engineer it, but if you let natural selection engineer it, You can accelerate that.
00:34:04.000Instead of saying, we don't know what to make of accelerated natural selection in a lab leaking, they try to make this move, which is like, there's no sign that this was engineered in a lab.
00:34:19.000Okay, well, you changed what the hypothesis is in order to say what you're saying to protect your future credibility.
00:34:25.000And the thing that I'm really freaking out about, you've been talking about it, Brett's been talking about it, I've been talking about it, all sorts of people have been talking about this one for a year.
00:34:34.000I increasingly think that none of these organizations think that they owe us any kind of truth.
00:34:39.000That when they get caught, it's just like, yeah, of course we had to say that.
00:34:58.000Who were they quoting that said they fortified the election?
00:35:01.000There was apparently some entire group under one guy with hundreds of activists who told their people, don't riot in the streets, have a dance party instead.
00:35:13.000I would highly recommend Time Magazine.
00:35:16.000I read the blurb about the fortifying, and I was like, hmm, that's a disturbing quote, but what does it mean?
00:35:41.000But we are so committed to democracy that even though we hate Donald Trump with a passion that won't let go 24-7, we still would never do anything against an election.
00:35:51.000The problem is with a guy like Trump, you can almost justify some horrible horseshit.
00:35:57.000If you claim that you have to fight all enemies, foreign and domestic, and you claim that he's a Russian asset, You're pretty much saying that you have to do something drastic.
00:36:07.000And so the number of things that people claim is what the problem is because they're not all compatible.
00:36:12.000And what I'm trying to get at more broadly is over and over I see the same move, which is deny, deny, deny, we get caught.
00:36:32.000I think the concept of a limited hangout where you know that something is too big to hold back, so you push a part of it into the public, not all of it, that's the limited, and you let the public think, okay, well now you know the truth, and it stops there.
00:36:46.000And then they stop asking questions because they've got a new toy to play with.
00:36:49.000Have you been paying attention to the border crisis shit?
00:36:53.000Where it's not bad when Democrats do it?
00:36:55.000It's not bad when Democrats do it, and it's even worse than when Trump was doing it, but it's still not bad.
00:37:53.000And then now they're calling it – they're not calling it the Biden administration anymore.
00:37:57.000They're calling it the Biden-Harris administration, which to me is like letting you know that there's only a matter of time before it's President Harris.
00:38:05.000You remember when you said this thing to this kid in Florida?
00:38:07.000I'm a – didn't say caretaker president, but – I'm just sort of here to warm the seat.
00:40:29.000That was like the weirdest place to perform.
00:40:31.000That was the beginning of the PC movement.
00:40:33.000It was like the PC movement in the 80s was like the first warning shots of wokeness, what we're experiencing now.
00:40:41.000Actually, if you go back to Clint Eastwood in one of the Dirty Harry movies, it's a really interesting scene where he's told that he has to approve new candidates for the force for detective, and there's a female candidate,
00:41:31.000Well, Tim Kennedy had a post about this recently because there was someone who was hired by the Pentagon for some sort of diversity role, and they just let him go because they found out that he had some posts that were very questionable on social media about Hitler and Trump,
00:42:17.000You know, we don't need to send a fucking South Pacific trans man in to do the job because it would make everybody look good in the newspaper.
00:42:26.000Like, you get the best killer for the job, and they're the ones who complete the task.
00:44:34.000The people that are woke, what it is, is a forced compliance to an ideology.
00:44:38.000And they'll bully you into compliance.
00:44:41.000Before they will hear your terms, they will bully you into compliance.
00:44:44.000And that's what happened with your brother in Clubhouse.
00:44:46.000They bullied him into a specific conversation before they allowed him to speak.
00:44:52.000Islam, for example, has a lot of overhead.
00:44:54.000In the name of all of the compassionate, the merciful, and Muhammad, peace be upon him.
00:44:58.000But they just write PBUH, so they only use up four characters, so they don't have to do the whole thing.
00:45:02.000But what I'm trying to say is, we should be able to say something like PBUH about the whole thing that we have to say every time we want to have an opinion, because it's just too expensive.
00:46:18.000And that's the thing that, you know, I wrote an entire article about this with Kayfabe, which is that in order to get wrestling to be exciting, you had to move away from actual wrestling.
00:46:28.000And that's the origin of professional wrestling.
00:46:41.000It's just we're at a weird time where people are pushing narratives and then other people are joining in because that narrative fits along with their ideology, even though they know there's some horseshit to what that narrative is.
00:46:58.000A good example is, are you aware of that 65-year-old woman that got beaten up in New York City?
00:47:52.000And because of these liberal ideas about rehabilitation and murder, this guy had only done, I think he'd only done like 10 or 12 years in jail for stabbing his mom to death.
00:48:06.000And so they let him go, and what does he do?
00:48:08.000He finds some woman and kicks the shit out of her.
00:48:12.000Did he kick the shit out of her because she was Asian, because he was aware of the propaganda against Asian people that de Blasio believes was influenced by Donald Trump's portrayal of the virus as being the Chinese virus?
00:48:36.000The reason why that guy did that is because he shouldn't have been on the street.
00:48:38.000But they're forcing us to talk about it over and over.
00:48:42.000The more we have to debunk this stuff, It's just a fire hose of debunkable stuff, and everything takes a half an hour to explain what somebody screwed up in four seconds.
00:49:57.000We're gonna really bring back the heart and soul of New York City.
00:50:00.000We need our arts and culture back, and we need people to see it and feel it, to participate in it, to know that that essence of New York City has not been defeated by the coronavirus, but will come back strong in 2021. Month after month in 2021, as you see the city come back to life,
00:51:40.000And this is the same guy that was saying that Donald Trump was responsible for this criminally insane person who kicked the shit out of this poor old lady.
00:53:27.000It's almost better when it's irrefutable.
00:53:31.000When the nonsense like de Blasio's video or him saying that this guy who got out of jail recently for stabbing his mother to death, that the reason why he kicked the shit out of this Asian lady was because of Donald Trump.
00:53:41.000This guy might not have even known Donald Trump was a thing.
00:53:44.000Did you see my graph from Google Ngrams, which was diversity and inclusion usage versus most qualified?
00:53:53.000And they cross in 2017, and most qualified is going down, and diversity and inclusion is going through the roof.
00:56:25.000It's a really unfortunate situation where you have these young kids that stole this Uber driver's car and he tried to stop that from happening and wound up dying.
00:58:35.000There's always some exploit that you can use to start again.
00:58:41.000And I'm increasingly feeling like reality...
00:58:46.000It's slipping away from us because the phone, it's a little bit like what happened with porn.
00:58:50.000We thought that porn was going to habituate us to non-standard sexual practices, and to an extent it did.
00:58:56.000But I don't think what we really understood is that it was going to rewire us so that it was very difficult to get aroused about anything because it changes your hedonic thresholds.
00:59:05.000I think the same thing is true for real life versus the phone.
00:59:09.000The phone is in some sense so much more intense for most people that that environment starts to blot out the feeling of being fully alive.
00:59:20.000So you think that the reason why they were so desensitized...
00:59:34.000Like the Capitol Hill thing on January 6th.
00:59:37.000Very clearly that woman was, you know, dealing with a loaded pistol, right?
00:59:43.000And you see the guy who's holding the gun take the finger and bring it inside the trigger guard and then he goes back out because he's like pointing it at her.
01:01:19.000But men who are unexceptional, that think they're exceptional because they're tied into a thing that they believe is like a movement to free...
01:01:33.000I think they just believe democracy is being served in some strange fucking way.
01:01:39.000There was a narrative called Stop the Steal and there was a narrative called Certify the Election.
01:01:43.000And they avoided themselves as long as they possibly could.
01:01:47.000And I was watching them and I did a tweet storm on January 4th because I could see January 6th was going to be the arc point.
01:01:53.000Very often, when you say Twitter isn't real life, It really isn't up until it arcs, and then you get a spark across it, and then holy shit.
01:02:03.000And so there are these twin narrative problems where you've got these two incompatible worldviews and these stories, and they avoid each other, like two guys circling each other.
01:02:14.000But both of them know that once we actually engage, it's pretty unpredictable what's about to happen.
01:02:20.000That's what I think you could see coming for January 6th.
01:02:23.000It had to happen that way in a weird way because the narratives had avoided each other for the maximal length of time because nobody wanted to have this out.
01:02:33.000And then it was impossible to stop the two from arcing.
01:02:37.000And the plates got too close together.
01:02:41.000So what you're saying is that you think that there's two worlds that aren't communicating with each other, and both of them believe wholeheartedly in what they're doing without listening to whatever might be reasonable that's coming from the other side, and then they collide.
01:02:56.000And there's no way of squaring the circle.
01:02:58.000At some point, there will be a Donald Trump presidency or a Joe Biden presidency.
01:03:03.000And once you realize that your story has collapsed, it's like a doomsday cult.
01:03:08.000You say it's going to end on such and such a day, and then it doesn't.
01:03:13.000Because everybody had the same concept.
01:03:15.000I think that if you listen to the audio from the Jim Jones, Jonestown Massacre, it's very clear that they got caught up in a story that they couldn't get out of.
01:03:24.000That's what happens in all cults, right?
01:03:27.000And the story becomes, the software that you're running, like there's this one woman named Hyacinth who hid under her bed and survived, you know?
01:04:01.000And I saw this with people, you know, I was trying to tell people, because I didn't believe the election was necessarily free and fair, but I also didn't believe that it was stolen in the way that Donald Trump was saying it was stolen.
01:05:09.000We are very social animals, but the ones that can go the longest in solitude and just think by themselves, there's a great benefit to that.
01:05:22.000I was forced into it because when I was a kid, we moved around a lot.
01:05:26.000We moved when I was 7 to San Francisco.
01:05:32.000I was forced to form my own opinions about things because I didn't have a steady group of friends where we all agreed on a certain narrative.
01:05:39.000That's a real problem with people in this country, agreeing on a certain narrative where you know socially That you have a contract you have to uphold.
01:08:39.000I reviewed this weird episode of you at the store when you took a break for seven years.
01:08:46.000And I looked at the courage that you had to have to do something unfunny in a funny context.
01:08:57.000I think it was an incredibly difficult situation.
01:09:00.000And I think I've been running from a similar situation my whole life.
01:09:04.000I don't want to face certain unpleasant facts That are out of keeping with the joy that I feel, with the love, with the creativity that I feel.
01:09:13.000And I don't want to let certain kinds of negativity take over my life.
01:09:19.000And then I have this other thing, which is I legitimately believe that if we are not very careful, theoretical physics is coming to an end.
01:09:27.000And I believe it is our only hope for getting outside the solar system.
01:09:30.000When you have Elon on and he talks about Mars or bust and all this kind of stuff.
01:09:35.000I cannot understand how mankind has gotten to the point where we are not spending our efforts trying to figure out how to spread out so that we don't self-extinguish on one, two, or three rocks.
01:09:50.000And the best hope we have is to go beyond Einstein.
01:09:55.000And we're losing the belief That we're capable of it.
01:10:01.000We're so worried about the professional norms and humiliation and what's going to happen if we say something and what our colleagues are going to say and all of this stuff that we're self-censoring and we're silencing ourselves because we'd rather be in good standing on the Titanic than risk saying,
01:13:24.000One of them is anonymous, and I refuse to deal with an anonymous coward who critiques me.
01:13:31.000Came up with three basic criticisms, and they'll have more because there'll be errors in this.
01:13:37.000But two of the criticisms are inferential.
01:13:40.000They imagine that I'm doing something that I'm not doing.
01:13:42.000One of the criticisms is valid but it's something that I would have brought up anyway.
01:13:47.000The most astounding thing about their so-called paper is that it shows that what I put out a year ago in a lecture on YouTube is understandable.
01:14:00.000In other words, they got from the lecture what the basic setup of this theory is.
01:14:05.000I want you to boil this down so that someone who doesn't understand physics at all will understand this in a way that they could maybe even explain to someone else.
01:14:47.000There is a team of people Brooke Dallas, Brandon Stone, Boku, a mysterious German who does amazing graphics, Tim, the mirthless swagman from Australia, Aardvark, and Nick, who have been, let's just go up to the top.
01:15:04.000So, for example, dramatizing Einstein's, the greatest insight of the 20th century, arguably, click on the one on the left and blow it up.
01:15:57.000Now, the idea is Einstein took curvature and fed it back into the space of rulers and protractors to say how the rulers and protractors would warp so that we can actually define gravity.
01:16:22.000And the key point is that Einstein figured out you had to get rid of a component called the vial curvature and readjust the Ricci scalar to put it into the space of rulers and protractors, which I bought from Amazon, strangely enough.
01:16:34.000And people, you see, I don't think in symbols.
01:16:39.000Now, the insight of geometric unity, if you'll go zoom out, Is that if you do the smaller neck, like we had a huge bottle to get it into metrics.
01:17:10.000Well, if you go to pull that up, Jamie, look, there's no way in which I can talk about tensor analysis, curvature tensors, the theory of everything.
01:17:18.000I understand, but I want you to boil this down.
01:18:06.000And they can peruse it, and there are going to be all sorts of problems and errors, but it's a complete story of who we are, what this place is.
01:20:17.000And what I'm going to do over time is to show people visually without symbols.
01:20:24.000In other words, if I say Ramanian metric, they're not going to know what I'm talking about.
01:20:28.000If I hand them rulers and protractors and a video of it, I don't know about the symbols, but I can follow an actual concrete thing.
01:20:35.000That thing, that water wiggle, the idea that that's a U1 principle bundle, that is one of the deepest things we only figured out in the 1970s that the light in this room comes from effectively seeing the world as having a water wiggle structure on top of it.
01:20:51.000Now, I'm not expecting on this show...
01:21:29.000If we spent an afternoon with a water wiggle, Or those videos, which we can't do because of your audience, I understand that.
01:21:37.000You could understand what a gauge theory is because you'd never see a symbol.
01:21:40.000There would never be a symbol between you and understanding why there's light in this room.
01:21:45.000The light in this room comes from a water wiggle structure about a circle that nobody's ever seen that is at every point in space and time, which is one of the great discoveries that we've made that nobody seems to care about.
01:21:57.000So how is it a water wiggle structure?
01:21:59.000Because there's a circle At every point that we can't perceive...
01:22:28.000It forms a cross-section to that water-wiggly structure that we didn't know about because it's invisible.
01:22:34.000And that's what photons are all about.
01:22:36.000And how do we know about that water-wiggly structure?
01:22:38.000We know about that water wiggle structure because we wrote down the equations called Maxwell's equations that unified all sorts of things that have to do with photons.
01:22:48.000Magnetism, electricity, x-rays, radio waves.
01:22:52.000All of that stuff got subsumed into really one equation called Maxwell's equation.
01:23:00.000That equation presupposes a circle out of nowhere.
01:23:04.000We didn't know that there was a circle, but we wrote down equations and the equations told us, hey, numbnuts, there's a circle that rotates just the way this water wiggle rotates at every point in space-time that you can't see it because that's the only way those equations make sense.
01:23:19.000Now you'll hear people, like you'll have Sean Carroll on, who want to talk about the multiverse, right?
01:23:23.000Or Neil deGrasse Tyson will want to tell you how big the universe is.
01:23:27.000And somehow people don't want to tell you, there's a circle around so we can see each other.
01:24:11.000And photons are like horizontal levels from which we measure rise over run to take the derivative.
01:24:16.000And then the idea that we have partial differential equations is how photons zing off of me and hit your eye and we see each other.
01:24:23.000That world of waves colliding, like everything in this place, is waves in collision with each other, waves interacting.
01:24:32.000The story of us is the story of interacting waves and the waves obey partial differential equations.
01:24:39.000So the fact that you have derivatives, which allow you to define the derivative in partial differential equations, differentials are derivatives, are determined by levels, which is on this page of videos we've made for you guys.
01:24:53.000And those things allow you to define the equations for waves which we are.
01:25:00.000So when you talk about the theory of everything, what you're actually saying is, tell me about a medium, waves in the medium, and rules for how waves behave moving around in the medium.
01:25:14.000It's a theory in which four dimensions births some elaborate crazy setup, which has interacting waves that look like electrons, up quarks, down quarks, protons, neutrons.
01:25:34.000And how did all that weird shit get into our world to form, like everything in here is made up of upquarks, downquarks, and electrons held together by force particles.
01:25:43.000It's like an incredibly economical statement about, look at all the diverse shit here.
01:25:51.000And what I believe is, is that we'll never have, we'll never take the time.
01:25:56.000It's like, let's spend a day talking about this shit and do it at a blackboard and do it with videos.
01:26:01.000Like we spent hundreds of hours making these videos to show you what these concepts are.
01:26:07.000Now, I understand the constraints of the show and I'm totally fine with that.
01:26:11.000But the point is, I believe that with artists and with imagination, we can actually show you What these structures are.
01:26:20.000I can draw lines with pens and show you what a derivative is on a water wiggle.
01:26:25.000And you can say, okay, you're doing calculus on a water wiggle, and there's a water wiggle-like structure in the world, which I never heard about, and that's what gives me light electromagnetism, all the stuff I know and love, that keeps electrons bound to protons and hydrogen atoms.
01:26:42.000That weird world of waves interacting with each other according to derivative equations, where the derivatives are determined from levels called gauge potentials, is visualizable with videos that we've been making.
01:26:56.000And the hope is that this is for experts, and they're going to have their day, and they're going to piss all over it, and they're going to be angry and mean, and that's going to happen.
01:27:05.000But at the end of that process, hopefully, the ideas herein contained Could change the world.
01:27:12.000It's the first time I've ever seen somebody tell a complete story about how did this place fill up with all this crazy stuff, assuming almost nothing to begin with.
01:27:22.000It's like a fertilized egg hypothesis.
01:27:24.000Show me a minimal amount I can assume and drag out falling in love on a park bench in early May.
01:27:35.000When you have a fertilized egg and it becomes your child, The story of development, of how something births itself, is what this is a story about.
01:27:45.000And that literally can explain falling in love on a park bench in May?
01:28:15.000Isn't the idea of magic just our own personal experience?
01:28:18.000Because everything is magic, if you've never experienced it, if it didn't exist.
01:28:23.000You know, there was this guy, Paul Dirac, who's really Einstein's only rival in the 20th century.
01:28:29.000And in 1963, he wrote this article in Scientific American where he said something insane.
01:28:36.000And he said, Schrodinger was led into error because he put too much weight on the particulars of agreement with experiment with his equations.
01:28:45.000And he was missing something called spin.
01:28:48.000But the essence of his idea was so beautiful that if he'd embraced beauty rather than the scientific method, he would have gotten farther quicker.
01:28:58.000And almost everyone who tries this crashes on the rocks.
01:29:02.000Everybody who tries to throw away the scientific method in service of beauty Almost cracks up.
01:29:09.000And the exception is the three guys who really wrote down physical laws that govern everything else that we know about the world.
01:29:17.000But why do you have to throw out the scientific method in service of beauty?
01:29:21.000Couldn't it just be a part of the equation of life itself?
01:34:34.000You know that that thing, like if you were going to eat Cabrales cheese, which has maggots infested in it, if you come from Spain, you understand that Cabrales is safe.
01:34:42.000So you call it a delicacy because it's some stupid stuff that you happen to have local information to know that it's safe.
01:34:49.000This is Brett Weinstein 101. Sure, but even in Spain, there's people that find it detestable.
01:34:53.000But my point to you is that what we are hiding behind the universals It is true that we all have subjective components, but it is not the case that you and I will have a conversation about a whole lot of love.
01:35:08.000And we will have an idea, like, that is just the best song.
01:35:11.000And you'll know that you have to say, okay, well, I understand that some people don't like it.
01:35:15.000But then, when you get drunk, you're going to say, how can you not like Whole Lotta Love?
01:35:19.000Yeah, but I mean, you would say that, but you know.
01:43:03.000It's not influenced by personal feelings or opinions in considering and representing facts.
01:43:10.000So you can say, objectively, someone is a very talented guitarist because you see how complicated their movements are and how they're hitting the strings.
01:43:21.000But you could say, subjectively, I don't enjoy that music.
01:44:23.000Yeah, but running with the devil is like, the fucking movements and the way he plays guitar, he's clearly got amazing ability with the guitar.
01:44:35.000Now, subjectively, you could say, I think that music's trash.
01:44:39.000Somebody else is going to make the claim in 2021. I think you're on my side of the issue and you're still...
01:44:49.000I think what you're now saying is expressing the tension of our moment.
01:44:54.000The tension of our moment is that as soon as somebody says that something is objective...
01:44:59.000Somebody will say, actually, to me, your definition of that isn't how I define it, and therefore I reclaim the subjectivity of it.
01:45:07.000I can turn Andrei Segovia or Eddie Van Halen or Jimmy Page or any of these people into not a good guitarist by redefining what a talented guitarist is.
01:45:18.000Is if I redefine the concept of talent on a guitar and I say talent on a guitar is somebody who can convince me of emotions that they're playing with and I didn't feel anything.
01:46:03.000I don't think Joe and I would polarize on that.
01:46:05.000I'm just saying, like, if you're throwing him into another situation, he'd be like, okay, play with these guys, and then he can't.
01:46:09.000Well, I think then, academically, he wouldn't be as proficient, like, in terms of, like, if he had to write the music down and teach it, maybe.
01:46:16.000I think if you took somebody like, do you know who Guthrie Govan is?
01:46:19.000Guthrie Govan is arguably the great guitarist of our age, and one of his tricks is you tell him a guitarist and he will play in that person's style in and of what he does on his own.
01:46:39.000If anyone is a good guitarist, Guthrie Govan can represent that person's guitar in a way that if you were blindfolded, You would say, boy, B.B. King is having a great day.
01:46:49.000And so that would be a proof that Guthrie Govan is, like it's a Turing test basically, that Guthrie Govan can emulate any guitarist.
01:46:58.000So if you believe anyone is objectively talented, then Guthrie Govan is objectively talented.
01:47:03.000That's the thing about guitar, is that it is an instrument with six strings, but people can make radically different noises with those six strings.
01:47:44.000But those things are based on the idea that you're trying not to switch guitars in the middle of a song when you're trying to do two things.
01:47:51.000Or Stanley Jordan will tap on two guitars simultaneously with his fingers as if he's playing the piano, which is insane.
01:48:02.000Well, Hendrix used to play Star Spangled Banner with his teeth.
01:48:38.000Yeah, I mean, that's a different thing, right?
01:48:41.000You can, like, there's people, like Gary Clark is a perfect example.
01:48:44.000Like I said, like Gary Clark, I'm pretty sure I played this for you, when Suzanne Santo and Gary Clark and Ben Jaffe were, they did this show in downtown LA and they played Midnight Rider.
01:51:33.000There were two guys in LA, I can't remember the other guy, who, the thing about them was that you were just convinced that their brains were 12,000 times faster than anybody else you'd ever met.
01:51:46.000Like that they were just in a weird way smarter.
01:51:50.000And Robin Williams' Free Association, it was like being on a Nantucket sleigh ride of the mind, and comedy was how it expressed itself, but it wasn't about comedy.
01:52:04.000It was about just like having thoughts interact with each other and you had to justify them by turning every thought into a joke that's influencing every other thought.
01:52:13.000It was like almost like excusing madness that was purposeful and pointful and amazing to watch.
01:52:21.000Unfortunately, he repurposed some other people's material.
01:52:26.000And I think that was part of the manic nature of this style was that sometimes he would come across a subject because he was freeballing and he would just use material that he knew of.
01:52:38.000Well, my guess is that the speeds he was at, he probably couldn't slow down to ask, where did that thought come from?
01:52:45.000Or maybe the ends justified the means, and then what he really was doing was just trying to put on the best performance that he could, and he had this idea that he knew wasn't necessarily his.
01:52:59.000I know Kinnison and him had a big squabble because of it, and I'm pretty sure he cut a check for Kinnison, and he cut checks for other guys that were at the store.
01:53:08.000Do the material on TV. So let me ask you a question about this.
01:53:11.000I guess I was reviewing that night in your life, and I was looking at the fact that it wasn't that funny when you went up and you said what had to be said.
01:53:26.000And it was painful for me to watch in a way because it was both...
01:53:30.000Courageous, but that's you know that that was a weird situation where I was called back on stage by Carlos Mencia That wasn't there wasn't like I know I made a statement.
01:53:41.000I had already done my set I already didn't stand up and then I went back because he called me out That you know like the me leaving the Comedy Store was not even my idea.
01:53:54.000It was like they banned me and In the story, didn't you...
01:54:16.000I think what you did is you obligated yourself into a role...
01:54:20.000Where you actually had to stand up for something.
01:54:22.000And the thing that I'm wrestling with, because I reviewed this whole story a few times, is this question about, like I look at your energy, and you're such a positive person in my life.
01:54:33.000And I look at that energy, and you were trying to take care of somebody like Ari.
01:54:43.000It was the concept that there was a guy who was more successful than everybody else who would just suck up everybody else's material and profit off of it.
01:54:50.000It was also that nobody else was saying.
01:54:51.000It was also that they knew it was happening.
01:54:54.000Everybody was talking about it and there was a silence.
01:54:56.000Bill Burr told me a story where he was performing there and he said to the guy that was a manager, the guy that I had the issue with, he said, fuck, I don't want to go on stage.
01:55:29.000And by the time that, when that instance happened, people recognized, oh, there's legitimate accountability for doing things along those lines.
01:55:41.000This is from 1964. Obama has passed his general exams which indicates that on academic grounds he is entitled to stay around here and write his thesis.
01:56:09.000However, they are going to try to cook something up to ease him out.
01:56:18.000All three, that is all three Harvard people, will have to agree on this, however.
01:56:22.000They are planning on telling him that they will not give him any money and that he had better return to Kenya and prepare his thesis at home, which means he will never get his PhD.
01:56:32.000Remember when they said, take a break to you?
01:56:39.000This is the thing I've been, you know, there's this whole story about what happened in my early life and why I don't talk about it publicly.
01:56:46.000And this is why this is interacting with your story about joke thievery, because it's weird for a comic not to turn that into a joke.
01:56:57.000In around, I don't know, 1988, 1989, Harvard University told me, to remain in good standing in this program, you cannot live in Massachusetts.
01:57:12.000How can you tell me where I can live and where I can't live?
01:57:17.000It wasn't until somebody FOIA'd Barack Obama's father in his file, and I read the story, that I realized that Harvard has a program for how it gets rid of people it wants to get rid of who are in good standing.
01:57:35.000It makes them move so that they can't complete their thesis.
01:57:38.000Why did they want to do that with you?
01:57:41.000Probably because I'm as learning disabled as the day is long.
01:57:44.000Probably because I took an unpopular stance that the equations that people were working with called the Donaldson theory self-dual equations were not the right equations to be working with and that we had somehow been assuming that they were highly peculiar to dimension four and that The difficulty of the equations,
01:58:03.000which was what was giving us all these great results, I had effectively gotten on the wrong side.
01:58:07.000I proposed some equations that I was told were insufficiently nonlinear, never mind what that means, that in 1994, effectively the same equations took over the entire field.
01:58:21.000Whatever it was, and this is like part of the idea of reclaiming your own story, It was so crazy that a university would tell me what state I could live in.
01:58:35.000So the people that are telling you this, they're operating on a pre-existing solution to deal with people that they find undesirable or problematic.
01:58:52.000Or it's like people maintain, for example, one way of...
01:58:57.000Getting rid of a tenured professor that's known is that you ask the person to report on their research and you load them up with teaching and you give them a lousy office.
01:59:07.000And then eventually they'll just quit because you make their life hell.
01:59:11.000So people know that there are these kind of secret, quiet ways to do the undoable.
01:59:43.000I, first of all, am not knowledgeable in that area.
01:59:46.000I think of him as a very bright superstar of some sort of part academic, part social crossover, high impact human being.
01:59:57.000I was there when Larry Summers was president of Harvard, when he went out and said, effectively, too many people are using the Harvard label.
02:00:08.000And we're going to be reining it in and going back to hard rigor and basics.
02:00:14.000Let me tell you what people don't understand about Harvard.
02:00:17.000Harvard is two separate structures fused together.
02:00:20.000One is about power and one is about achievement.
02:00:23.000And the two of them are interlinked in a way that cannot be separated.
02:00:29.000Without the achievement, Harvard wouldn't have this kind of glowing reputation that causes us to sort of ooh and ah over it historically.
02:00:39.000Without the power, it wouldn't be able to attract the money and it wouldn't be able to constantly position itself.
02:00:46.000So through achievement, It gets enough cachet to wield power.
02:00:51.000Through the power, it gets the resources to buy achievement.
02:00:54.000And this sort of thing is not understood.
02:00:56.000And I've been on both sides of this thing.
02:01:00.000Like, one of the things that happened was that the Boskin Commission in 1996 tried to figure out how to cut Social Security and raise taxes without getting caught.
02:01:13.000Because that's the third rail of politics.
02:01:16.000And what they said is, if we change the CPI, the Consumer Price Index, the way we measure inflation, because tax brackets are indexed and because entitlement payments for Social Security and Medicare are indexed, if we claim that inflation is overstated by 1.1 percentage points,
02:01:34.000we will gain a trillion dollars in savings.
02:01:38.000And the public won't be able to object to it because we're going to be just adjusting a dial.
02:01:43.000We're going to say that this dial was broken and we got some technocrats to fix it.
02:01:48.000So they figured out we want to get a trillion dollars over 10 years.
02:02:54.000We did not understand what happened to the work that I did with my wife in economics, which is that we were trying to show how you could actually compute the Consumer Price Index objectively using gauge theory.
02:03:07.000The same year, they were trying to figure out how do we steal a trillion dollars over 10 years by doing funny games with the gauge called inflation.
02:03:49.000Okay, Dale said 1.1% implies 1 trillion in Social Security savings over 10 years.
02:03:55.000Somehow, our separate efforts came up with the 1.1% bias number.
02:04:01.000In other words, They came up with the target, which is, let's save a trillion dollars.
02:04:08.000And then they came up with, we have to say it's overstated by 1.1.
02:04:12.000We then broke into two groups and somehow, key word, we put the numbers together and we got the target.
02:04:19.000This is academic malpractice in the absolute extreme.
02:04:24.000When Harvard was doing that, it was acting in its power capacity.
02:04:27.000And the way they did it was they buried What I think is probably the best work in 25 to 50 years in mathematical economics that happened in the Harvard Economics Department, which is a second so-called marginal revolution where we changed the calculus underneath all of economic theory.
02:04:45.000So how does something like this happen?
02:05:06.000In another presentation they say, we solved this at the kitchen table of my cousin's house in Florida.
02:05:12.000And you're just thinking like, Okay, so it's five guys, Bob Packwood and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a Democrat and a Republican, got together, picked five economists who were willing to play the dirty game.
02:07:43.000I realized by reviewing your history and revealing you're seven years away from the store, I don't want to be associated with Dale Jorgensen.
02:07:58.000And what I realized is I don't want to be associated with the shit that happened over something called the Cyberg-Witten equations.
02:08:06.000What I just handed you, one of the reasons I've held it back is that it very clearly gives an alternate definition, alternate motivation and derivation of the equations that revolutionized gauge theory, which is what I was thinking about in around 1987, 1988. And I've lived afraid of my own story because it's such an ugly story.
02:08:30.000The story of a guy who was not allowed to attend his own thesis defense to any academician.
02:08:36.000You hear, like, what do you mean you weren't allowed to?
02:09:21.000I couldn't accept myself in this world of like, you know, if you play classical music, everybody's technically brilliant.
02:09:27.000There's no technically weak people in classical music.
02:09:31.000I was like a guy, it was like John Lee Hooker in the orchestra of, you know, the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra on one string and a guitar playing with some weird syncopated rhythm.
02:10:37.000When I put forward those equations, and he said they're insufficiently nonlinear, and he said self-duality doesn't have anything to do with spinners, because if it did, Nigel Hitchens would have told us.
02:12:22.000I think with all my flaws and all my failings and being 25 years out of the field, I believe that this story is going to be fixed by people who are trying to shoot it down.
02:16:21.000And there's something that I feel like about life, that if you just open, if you don't bullshit yourself, and you're willing to take risks, those things find you, or you find them,
02:16:37.000and then once you get going, the easiest part is once you've already started, just continuing.
02:16:43.000The hardest part is getting going with everything.
02:16:45.000The hardest part is showing up for the first class.
02:18:24.000There's a great benefit for me personally to do this podcast and to talk to interesting people and to have these conversations and I've most certainly been educated beyond my wildest dreams in the 11 years that I've done it.
02:18:35.000I've learned so much about just the broadest spectrum of ideas.
02:18:42.000You're going to claim you're not doing it for the world because the world has been changed.
02:22:08.000And lately, I haven't been doing that much of that because of the pandemic and trying to be responsible and not do that many shows, you know, and certainly not do shows without people being COVID tested, right?
02:22:20.000And I'm hoping that as we come out of this, and it seems like we're coming out of this, it'll be easier.
02:22:41.000Because if you do, like one of the things that comics fell trapped to in the early days, not the early, you know, last 10, 20 years, was they would do a lot of jokes about being a comic on the road.
02:23:57.000If I'm going to write on getting drunk, the perils of getting drunk, the pros and the cons and what feels good and what feels bad and what's good about it, what's bad about it, what do I hate about it, what do I love about it.
02:24:11.000And then out of this, I might write 3,000, 4,000 words.
02:24:16.000But out of it, I might have one paragraph that comes across, that becomes...
02:24:42.000And then I smoke a joint, and then I go over it, and then I go, oh, that's it, right there.
02:24:47.000So one of the things that I learned from sort of studying, when you do a bit and I see it multiple times, I learn about when you find the rhetorical formulation, That allows you to get closer to the truth without paying the outsized price.
02:25:09.000I remember you had something about getting high and having kids.
02:25:13.000And it was a very difficult issue because obviously people do get high and they do have kids.
02:25:19.000And then we have this idea, you know, it's like being sexy leads to kids, but sex and kids have to be kept apart.
02:25:27.000All of these are weird ways in which normal adult behavior and children are incompatible.
02:25:33.000And so there was like a William Tell Act, in some sense, that had to be How am I going to talk about two things that are not supposed to coalesce, but obviously they coalesce in people?
02:25:46.000And that's sort of what I wonder about when you hone a bit, is that you can get closer and closer to the truth because you find the formulation that actually works without blowing up in your face.
02:25:56.000It's like, I can throw this grenade and wait to the point where it's maximally effective without losing a hand.
02:26:01.000Well, the beautiful thing is sometimes you lose hands.
02:28:00.000As opposed to every other person who opens up a comedy club.
02:28:03.000Every other person who opens up a comedy club opens up a comedy club to make money.
02:28:07.000They say, I'm going to have these comedians, you know, I'm going to make X percentage of the door, and they're going to make this, and I'm going to make a good living.
02:29:36.000This guy is one of the greatest human beings, and the privilege of coming to this show, he is one half of the Attia-Singer Index Theorem, a courageous guy, brilliant beyond words,
02:29:53.000who changed the entire face of mathematical physics.
02:30:03.000A human being who I had a falling out with over the National Academy of Sciences.
02:30:09.000I hate mushrooms more than anything in this world.
02:31:53.000And I discovered that the National Academy of Sciences had faked a shortage of scientists and engineers They did a secret study where they looked at supply and demand and decided that the price of American scientists and engineers was going to hit six figures.
02:32:08.000And they subtracted the demand curves and they said let's fake a demographic supply crisis where we wouldn't have enough scientists.
02:32:18.000They got us to pass the 1990 Immigration Act, which came with H-1B. And I told Iz this.
02:32:25.000And it put him in a position where the thing that he loved, which was the system, because he was the guy who made the system work, He was like Harriet Tubman.
02:32:39.000And then I had to show him that the system had gotten so corrupted that we were going to give it all away to China.
02:32:44.000We were going to allow the Chinese to populate our labs and put a proctoscope in the entire university system, which is where we do our research, so they would get the benefits of totalitarianism and the benefits of our freedom.
02:32:55.000They'd learn all the stuff we were doing with our freedom, and then they'd go implement and execute with totalitarianism.
02:33:01.000And Iz was so angry at me that I had found the study in 1986 done with the National Science Foundation and the National Academy to fake a fake shortage of scientists and engineers to pass the 1990 Immigration Act that led to H-1B. That he and I got to a point where we couldn't talk to each other.
02:33:55.000I'd go up to his office and we'd talk about jazz and love and children and heartbreak and all sorts of stuff.
02:34:01.000And he believed in this that I showed you, okay?
02:34:05.000He had so much confidence that when I came to Cambridge, shit out of luck, when Harvard was trying to asphyxiate me, he stood up for me and gathered the entire creme de la creme of the MIT math physics world To hear what I had to say because he believed.
02:34:23.000And then he made sure that I got an NSF postdoc and that I got a postdoc at MIT and he repaired my story, right?
02:34:33.000And he was at my wedding and I never got a chance to say goodbye to him.
02:34:37.000And the New York Times did an obituary And the New York Times hasn't talked to me for like eight years almost, something like that.
02:34:46.000And I looked at the obituary to hear about his singer and like I'm the major quote because they were still talking to me and they do the obituary so many years in front.
02:34:57.000I've met a tiny number of people who will be remembered a thousand years from now.
02:35:01.000This is one of like three people I can say for sure, if people are still talking a thousand years from now, they're going to remember him because he did this wonderful thing, the Atiyah Singer Index Theorem.
02:35:22.000It was shocking to remember that I had been enough part of the system that I could be respectable, that I could be trusted to say something about this great man who just passed at, like, I don't know, 96. And I never got a chance to,
02:35:39.000like, say goodbye or repair the relationship.
02:35:43.000And, you know, I was in touch with his daughter who writes for the New York Times.
02:35:50.000And if you said something really brilliant, like really fucking brilliant, he'd often go to the cabinet and say, you know, it's funny.
02:35:57.000I haven't thought about that for N years.
02:35:59.000And he'd pull out a piece of paper, and there was your brilliant idea, which he didn't even think to publish, because it wasn't ready yet.
02:36:08.000And on the one hand, you were just devastated, like, holy shit, you had that thought?
02:36:14.000And on the other hand, you were like, I had a thought that is singer-hit, you know?
02:36:18.000It's like, there's this level, like if Carlin might maybe, you know, for some comics, or Lenny Bruce, or Richard Pryor, or Dave Chappelle, or somebody like that.
02:36:30.000There are these relationships where people are just at such an incredible level that you can't even believe that some human being has ascended.
02:36:39.000And the period of time that I spent with him taught me more about what the human mind is capable of than just about anything.
02:36:46.000He's the smartest, most brilliant man I've ever had the pleasure to know really, really well.
02:36:52.000I still don't understand the falling out.
02:36:55.000He didn't want to give up on the idea that the National Academy was good.
02:37:02.000Well, sometimes things can be good and flawed, right?
02:37:05.000But for him to actually take what I was saying, that the National Academy was acting against the American interest by narrowly saying we need to make American scientists and engineers cheaper, that we need to flood the market, we need to interfere in the wage mechanism,
02:37:21.000we need to allow China first look at everything we do, The concept that the problem was the National Academy when he was the National Academy.
02:37:31.000What was the motivation of the National Academy to do that?
02:37:35.000In the Reagan administration, for the first time, they appointed somebody to come in from industry rather than academics to head the National Science Foundation, a guy named Eric Block.
02:37:46.000And I think he came from IBM? Not sure.
02:37:49.000Eric Bloch took a sort of green eyeshade view of the world, like, holy shit, we're going to have to overpay for American scientists and engineers.
02:37:59.000How do we avoid having to pay six figures for new PhDs?
02:38:03.000How do we avoid letting the genius of the market solve the problem of supply and demand?
02:38:08.000Because there's no such thing as a labor shortage in a market economy long term, right?
02:38:13.000The wage mechanism will rise and you'll get as many people as you want.
02:38:18.000And when Eric Bloch did this, he went through a guy named Peter House, and they picked an economist named Miles Boylan, whose name I've never said, who in 1986 wrote a study that said, here's how expensive it's going to be to pay for scientists and engineers who are American in the future.
02:38:37.000And I had deduced from first principles that they had done a competent economic study and that they had faked economics.
02:38:45.000An incompetent demographic study by subtracting a demand curve.
02:38:51.000So they hid the competence and pretended that they were incompetent to pass the Immigration Act of 1990, which brought us the H-1B, which brought us huge numbers of Chinese graduate students who currently staff our labs and who we're addicted to.
02:39:07.000And this gives China the benefit, a first look at the benefits of freedom and the benefits of the ability to execute with an iron fist.
02:39:17.000The idea that I was telling Isidore, you don't understand.
02:39:23.000Your organization is doing the wrong thing.
02:39:25.000You have to stand up against your own organization.
02:41:13.000The National Academy of Sciences, something called the Government University Industry Research Roundtable, and something called the Policy Research and Analysis Division of NSF, the two main science groups, National Academy and National Science Foundation, teamed up against American science for the benefit of employers to make sure that they would never have to pay market prices.
02:41:35.000They gave away our advantage, our geopolitical strategic advantage, And they spun an entire story about we need the best and the brightest, but it was all about money.
02:41:47.000And this guy, Miles Boylan, who's an economist, who's I believe sort of semi-retired from NSF, is the name I've held back.
02:41:54.000Like I'm saying names that I don't normally say in public.
02:42:02.000I lost somebody I cared so much about over this issue.
02:42:20.000At some point they had a reporter from Science Magazine and I spoke and there's no record that I said anything.
02:42:29.000I got a standing ovation at a conference for talking about the fact that I had caught them in this In this conspiracy against American scientists.
02:42:41.000And I learned about what happens when, like, you're going and you say, can you please report this?
02:42:49.000It's like suddenly your voice vanishes.
02:42:51.000And I said, you know, Iz, they've had me there four times.
02:42:54.000They've asked me four times to tell them how I've caught them.
02:43:03.000And like, I don't want to be talking about that.
02:43:04.000I want to be talking about the Atiyah Singer Index theorem or Ray Singer torsion or any of the beautiful things, the BPST instanton, all the wonder that Is Singer brought into the world.
02:43:12.000I want to talk about him saving my career if I'd wanted one.
02:43:16.000This was the thing that didn't go that way.
02:43:18.000It was me saying, you know the thing that you loved?
02:44:54.000I got up and I said, Sherwin, very interesting that you think scientists are like cattle.
02:45:00.000Let me tell you a different story about economists And then I went through what I'd unearthed, okay?
02:45:08.000And I brought a room that was in an academic conference to a standing ovation.
02:45:15.000That never happens for an academic conference.
02:45:19.000Because people wanted to hear the truth.
02:45:22.000And Sherwin Rosen You know, went off to the airport and said that was the most impudent young man I've ever talked to.
02:45:29.000And then I got invited to the COSAPUP committee.
02:45:31.000And the COSAPUP committee said, you know, Eric, the problem with your model is scientists are not in any way motivated by money.
02:45:38.000They only care about the truth, and that's why all of your models don't work.
02:45:43.000And I said, great news, because I have a friend who's got a wife who's eight months pregnant being paid $14,000 a year.
02:45:52.000So I'm going to open my briefcase, and we're going to use the tool called Revealed Preference, and we're going to go around, given that you're all doing very, very well in your lives, and we're going to open up the briefcase, and we're going to allow you to put in an IOU for how much money you don't care about to help the struggling young topologist and his wife.
02:46:11.000And I looked at each member of the COSPOP committee, and I got to one of them.
02:46:14.000He said, okay, Eric, you've made your point.
02:46:17.000And one of them said, well, who did this dastardly thing?
02:46:20.000And I said, the Government University Industry Research Roundtable.
02:46:42.000And then there's no record that any of this happened.
02:46:44.000And one of the reasons I don't talk about this is not that I don't have the goods.
02:46:48.000It's that I don't want to ruin the beauty of who we are and what we do.
02:46:56.000I keep waiting for these people to retire and stop ruining our universities and stop ruining the next generation of kids and stop charging people so much that they have to effectively go into gray area prostitution in order to pay off their student loans.
02:47:11.000I keep saying, when are we going to get rid of this class of people that ran everything into the ground?
02:47:20.000And that was one of the things that I did by reviewing what you did with joke thievery, as I realized that you said, joke thievery isn't actually funny.
02:47:31.000And these things that I'm talking about, about burying careers, about destroying people, about interfering with the wage mechanism, about giving away our advantage to our geopolitical rivals, are not funny.
02:47:45.000And I've realized that this is the thing that I'm unwilling to talk about.
02:47:49.000I don't want to get into the ugliness of going up against the National Academy of Sciences and saying, what the hell is wrong with you people?
02:47:56.000But now I've decided I'm going whole hog and I'm going to be who I am.
02:48:02.000One of the things that I'm worried with when it comes to woke culture is not that people think the way they think, because I think a lot of young people think that way.
02:48:12.000A lot of young people have socialist, Marxist ideas, because it seems like it's a good thing to think of, you know?
02:48:18.000And then, you know, woke ideology, at least...
02:48:23.000On the surface, it seems to be spreading what you would call social justice, which seems to be a positive thing, right?
02:48:33.000What my concern really is, and I think what's highlighted what you were just expressing about these Chinese scientists...
02:48:45.000My real concern is, and I think this is probably actually happening right now, is the way that people are expressing things online is not entirely organic.
02:49:17.000Accelerating the rhetoric and pushing the narrative.
02:49:21.000The thing about this woke ideology that we were talking about before with this forced compliance is that people feel compelled to agree with everything.
02:49:32.000They feel compelled to go along with whatever the ideology is proposing.
02:49:38.000I think a bad actor can insert almost like bad code into an operating system.
02:49:47.000Like a virus into an operating system and accentuate or advance things past the point that just a few years ago would be considered preposterous.
02:49:58.000And I think that this woke ideology, the way it permeates through academia and the way it doesn't allow for reasonable debate, it doesn't allow for uncomfortable ideas, and it enforces things like safe spaces and And trigger warnings and all this shit that's just not supposed to have anything to do with learning and growing and exploring ideas.
02:50:23.000That we are empowering what are essentially our economic enemies and our political enemies.
02:50:34.000I think these things are all connected.
02:50:36.000And I think the economic motivation that allowed those people to essentially...
02:50:44.000You know, they essentially cut the Achilles heel of science by making it so that these scientists could only earn a certain amount of money and disincentivizing people who are economically...
02:50:58.000I want to make scientists reasonably middle class or better.
02:51:03.000I want men and women who are raising families...
02:51:06.000I want them not to have to worry about money so they can pursue science.
02:51:09.000Yes, I want gay couples to be able to raise kids, but I want them in the same state.
02:51:16.000I know people who are two states away who think that they have jobs close to each other.
02:51:41.000I interviewed investigators for the American Society of Cell Biology, and principal investigators who were at the top of the bio pile say, we're supposed to not have children because we have to show that we're serious.
02:51:54.000One claim was, we make people wait to get tenure into their late 30s and early 40s because some percentage of females discover that motherhood is as interesting as science.
02:52:15.000You would talk to somebody and say, look, you know, you can say what you want about best and the brightest, but really what I enjoy is having a slave labor force.
02:52:23.000Americans don't actually listen to directions.
02:53:00.000And I thought, why are you telling me all these things?
02:53:01.000What does that have to do with slave labor?
02:53:04.000That the PIs, the heads of labs, need an army of people to do exactly what they say in order to be competitive to win grants and get prizes and publish papers.
02:53:31.000Postdocs and graduate students are a labor force.
02:53:34.000So the idea is that they provide a service, but ultimately it will lead to them being PhDs and...
02:53:43.000Yes, but very often what they're really doing, the foreign ones, are very often trying to immigrate.
02:53:47.000And so the idea is that the way into the country is that I'm going to contribute N years of labor at a very high level, at a very low price, pretending that I'm not a worker, that I'm a graduate student, China, for example, will get the ability to look at what we're doing because their people are in our labs.
02:54:08.000The PI gets low-cost labor to carry out the research.
02:54:15.000And the system is based on the idea that pliant labor is in an abundant supply.
02:54:21.000So I forget, like a quarter of PhDs went to China, something like that.
02:55:25.000But the point is that we just gave away our technical advantage Because we couldn't get the money to pay for our own labor because we actually have the best and brightest people right here in the States.
02:55:36.000So these people learn as graduate students on these projects and then take that information and go back overseas.
02:55:43.000Or they stay here and they have a very strong tie because very often our professors, in order to remain competitive, have to take on this kind of science knows no boundaries.
02:55:55.000Well, if science knows no boundaries, why are our tax dollars supporting it?
02:55:58.000So this is how you get to a situation like where the World Health Organization refuses to say the name Taiwan.
02:57:05.000And I want to say, look, I don't want to fear you.
02:57:09.000I want you to be more open to your people with their middle fingers up telling you to go fuck yourselves.
02:57:16.000And in order to get that freedom, remember Tiananmen Square and the Statue of Liberty and all that kind of stuff?
02:57:21.000In order to get that, we can't give them the benefits of both systems.
02:57:25.000What we've done is we've given them the benefits of freedom by taking all the stuff that they can see that we're doing, and then they have all the benefits of command and control.
02:57:35.000So they execute like crazy and they listen through their people here.
02:57:42.000And then they build, you know, programs where people go back and forth.
02:57:46.000And so what we're doing is we have a group of people who are so idealistic.
02:58:06.000We have high schools in New York that have won more Nobel Prizes in science than all of China.
02:58:11.000And we are destroying ourselves lying that Americans can't do science.
02:58:18.000I see your complaint, but what can be done about it?
02:58:21.000Well, one thing is, is that if I have a friend who has a ridiculously large podcast, I can go on about once a year, and I can say crazy shit, and then maybe, maybe, somebody will write about this.
02:59:09.000Because he's too embedded into the system.
02:59:12.000Because he, look, this is a guy who made the system run.
02:59:18.000If you're proud of our universities, if you're proud of our government, if you're proud of journalism in a previous era, this was the kind of a guy who would break the sons of bitches who would do bad things.
03:06:55.000But the number of songs, the number of standards that he came up with, even minor ones, like Hellhounds on My Trail and Sweet Home Chicago.
03:07:05.000He was clearly, especially for the time, like, what year are we talking about with Robert Johnson?
03:07:27.000Freddie King is super important, but I think that the issue of bending notes that B.B. and Albert did, and their particular boxes next to each other on the guitar neck...
03:07:40.000One of them we associate with Albert, which has got meaner and more minor.
03:07:45.000And the BB box, weirdly, is all about this major minor alteration through bending.
03:07:52.000You don't hit a note by playing the note.
03:07:54.000You hit a note underneath and you move up into it.
03:07:57.000And so it's this vocal articulation and particular kinds of vibrato.
03:08:02.000And the weird thing about super technical players, like the most, like a John Petrucci or something, is you say, well, who do you revere?
03:09:54.000He's one of the few guys that it resonates today.
03:09:57.000You go and listen to old Pryor, it's still really funny.
03:10:01.000Whereas Lenny Bruce is like, you've got to kind of put yourself in the times of Lenny Bruce.
03:10:07.000You've got to put yourself in the 50s and 60s and try to imagine what it was like to be in this incredibly suppressed...
03:10:13.000I think so much of what I believe was important about the 50s is that jazz and comedy and a few of these things, like maybe beat poetry, were so dependent on the oppression of the normies...
03:10:28.000There were these just islands of magic.
03:10:32.000And they were so oppressed that things that are standard to us today were just revolutionary to them.
03:10:37.000Well, that's the thing, is that I listen for what these guys were doing, and I think about there were these...
03:10:47.000Math and physics seminars in the Soviet Union that we did not understand were entirely dependent upon the fact that everything in the Soviet Union sucked.
03:10:55.000And so that you could go to these places and say, here's an island of transcendence in a sea of shit, right?
03:11:02.000And so in a weird way, I think the U.S. had this, and I don't know if I mentioned this to you before, at some point they held San Francisco Home Movie Night at the Castro Theater and I went.
03:11:14.000And they asked everyone to send their old home movies of San Francisco.
03:11:18.000And people were filing out of Candlestick Park or something in 1962. And I noticed that half the people looked like modern human beings and half of them had that glazed look that you'd have with a formal hat on your head and like a suit jacket that you associate with photographs from like an earlier time.
03:11:36.000And so it was like you were looking at cardboard cutouts and modern human beings simultaneously.
03:11:56.000There is sort of almost no trace of this.
03:11:58.000And George Thorogood was the guy who said, when I saw the Beatles on Ed Sullivan, He said, it was the first time I saw young people having fun in public on TV. Like, just not performatively.
03:12:12.000And I didn't realize the extent to which this was the oppression that animated the Lenny Bruce milieu.
03:12:19.000And, you know, if you were going to see Lenny Tristano or, you know, Dizzy Gillespie or Bud Powell, you know, like, if you just think about the beginning of Howl, you know, this thing about I've seen the best minds of my generation, blah, blah, blah.
03:12:33.000People are seeking something authentic and real, and the hippies aren't yet.
03:12:38.000You know, we just lost Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the great last beat poet of the City Lights bookstore in San Francisco.
03:12:45.000I don't know how he lasted this long, over 100, I think.
03:12:49.000I think we forget about the beats as important to that time.
03:12:55.000Well, I think people are being suppressed in a different way now.
03:13:55.000I think what's going on right now is a good thing for comedy because comedy has become radioactive and certain words are forbidden but that just makes it so that you have to figure out a more clever way to describe things in a way that resonates with people better in a way where While also being funny,
03:14:16.000you're figuring out a way to let these people know you're a good person.
03:14:19.000You're a good person, but you're talking shit.
03:14:22.000So what confuses me is, I would imagine that our comedy right now and our music right now would be as good as they've been for a long time.
03:14:31.000And I think our comedy is pretty amazing.
03:14:34.000And I think our music is not hitting the same heights.
03:15:35.000My reaction is you're screwing up the repression angle.
03:15:39.000If you want to say something like wet-ass pussy, you want to do it in a way that you're frustrating it and making it difficult, so you have to work for it.